The Next War Is Already Here. The West Isn't Ready. — Yaroslav Azhnyuk, The Fourth Law & Guest Host Noah Smith, Noahpinion

So think about this. Last year, Ukraine produced 4,000,000 FPV drones. Ukraine is not the most industrious nation in the world.

China can produce 4,000,000,000 of these FPV drones. Would you say that right now, China is now the supreme conventional military power on Earth, given its ability to manufacture and deploy drones in the quantity and quality that you just described. I don't think we have all the information to claim that, but we cannot count it out.

And that alone should be, you know, a big warning sign. And as I say, at some point in my life, went from making cameras that fling treats to pets, to cameras that fling explosives to the occupiers. So that's the short story.

And when you think about what your nation, what your patriots are going through, you realize that that's the only morally right thing to do is to fight back. And it is immoral not to fight back. And then that the choice becomes very clear.

Good to be here. Thank you. On February 23, late in the evening, like, I think, like, 11PM Kyiv time, my wife and I, we landed in Kyiv.

Actually, then she was a fiancee. And and we were we came from Lviv where we were looking at a church where our wedding should have taken place. And we got into this cab riding from airport to our home.

And the driver was like, you crazy. Like, everyone's leaving Kyiv. Why why why do you come?

Like, what? Nothing's happen. Like, dude, chill.

And then obviously, eight minutes later or eight eight hours later, the bombs fell in the city. I was quite surreal. We probably landed on the last flight that landed in Kyiv or one of those last flights.

But, yeah, you know, my background, I'm a tech guy. I studied applied mathematics in Kyiv politics, born and raised in Kyiv. Parents, you know, old PhDs from academia and grandparents to, like, everything, you know, from linguistics to nuclear physics.

And I'm an entrepreneur, so I build a bunch of companies. Petcube is the one you were referencing. So I lived in San Francisco twenty fourteen to 2020.

I'm building which is one of the leading pet device companies in the world, selling lots of pet cameras. And then, yeah, as I say, at some point in my life, I went from making cameras that fling treats to pets, to cameras that fling explosives to the occupiers. So that's a short story.

Yeah.

Well, we had a plan for the situation. So my my parents and family family live live in in Kyiv, and we're like, okay. This has actually started.

The the worst has come true. And so we basically packed our belongings and got in the car and spent seventeen hours riding West. And that was pretty sure most people in our audience watched an at least one apocalyptic movie in their life.

So that was exactly like that. Like, felt exactly like that. I, you know, missiles are falling.

Like, there was smoke in Kyiv, like, you know. My dad and I went, like, to central part of the cities. It's probably, like, 800 meters from Presidential Office to pick some stuff in in his workplace.

He's like, you know, head of an academic institution, so he had to get some of the things with him. And super surreal, like, the the the streets are empty. Like, the gas stations are out of gas.

Like, we found some gas station. We didn't have, like, spare canisters with us. So we're, like, we we figured out, like, the car was diesel.

So, like, we figured out if it's diesel, you can actually store it in plastic canisters. And we bought some window wash for the cars. We poured it out of the canisters, and we poured the the the diesel into that.

Yeah. So it was like that. And then, like, you know, helping friends get out, like my friend and his dog, like, found like, my brother was also, like, riding in a separate car.

We found a place for my friend who didn't have a car. Like, yeah, it's like totally surreal. Wow.

Yeah. And we didn't know, you know, of course, then you didn't know this will last for so long. You didn't know whether Kyiv will be able to whether you kind of will be able to defend Kyiv.

And I was like, yeah, very little information and very little insight into future.

to I didn't get any, like, military education when I was a student. Like, normally, in Ukraine, you would you would go to, this military school even if you're getting higher education in any any other sphere. I decided to skip that, which which is, like, an unusual way to go.

And I never thought that I will be somehow engaged in a war effort. And like, what is war? Of course, wars are over.

It's the end of history. So one thing you gotta understand about, like, many Ukrainians and, like, I guess, it's also true about most of the people I met here in The US that your who you are in terms of your nationality is a big part of your identity. So when that gets under attack, it's something deeper than just the country you live in gets under attack.

Right? And so I I day one, I figured I'm gonna I'm gonna fight back with everything I can. Right?

But I I didn't think on day one that I'm actually gonna do weapons. And, you know, there were a bunch of things. We're reaching out to a number of American congresspeople and centers and basically advocating for support of Ukraine for voting for land lease, which has happened in May 2022, but didn't actually work as expected.

Yeah. We helped start Brave One, which is now very important defense innovation cluster, sort of like a DIU here in The US. We helped start a fund called D3.

It's like I was started or co started by Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google. So a bunch of these odd things, but then eventually, was like, okay, by 2023, it was obvious this thing, a, is gonna last a lot more time. And b, that the whole world is shifting and that there's gonna be a new arms race, that the warfare is redefined by drones as platforms.

And for the first time in history, you have a platform that is software defined, that can increase your battlefield capabilities, you know, in a in a step change just overnight. So it's like, if you were able to push a software update and get all of your Roman legionnaires new helmet, you know. That has never been possible before.

It's it's the first time in the history of war this is possible. So all of that many other things like, you know, supply chain fertilization and the impact that AI is going to have on all of this. All these things have become evident to me in twenty twenty and three years.

Like, okay, I should do what I do best or what I know how to do best, start a tech company and sort of leverage the global techno capitalist machine to provide defensibility to Ukraine and the free world. So that's literally the mission of the company, you know, increase defensibility of Ukraine and the free world. And then there was some sort of soul searching and it's like asking yourself, it's like, okay, am I actually, I know nothing about weapons.

Am I actually, like, ready to make, you know, things that other people use to kill other bad people? And when you think about what your nation, what your, you know, compatriots are going through. Think about all the terror of places like Bucha, the occupied cities in the East and and South, the abducted children, the raped women, all the economic damage that's being done, and the intention to destroy a whole nation, to genocide the people of Ukraine, you realize that that's the only morally right thing to do is to fight back.

And it is immoral not to fight back. And then the the choice becomes very clear. And, look, we're we're just passing the ammunition.

We're not doing the actual job. The the actual fighters and defenders and heroes are people in in the armed forces or just support.

I think there are no issues there. Yeah. What would an example of a moral question be in this case?

Well, no.

becomes easier and more complete if we ask this not about a particular technology or particular weapon. If we think that this question actually applies to any kind of technology. Right?

So knife or fire, you know, you can use knife to do surgery and save people's lives, or you can use it as a weapon to take people's lives. Cut tomatoes too. Cut tomatoes too.

Yes. Knife. Yeah.

So, you know, it's like it's with any technology, large language models. Right? Look at how powerful they are and yet they're available to anyone in North Korea or in Russia.

So that's one side of the argument. The the other side is, as a maker, what is your responsibility for how the tools you're creating will be used? There's definitely some responsibility.

Right? Then, you know, how how should the decision process look like? Should you, like, try to calculate all the possible scenarios before starting to work on something?

Or do you create something that is needed now to save people's lives and then think about, you know, addressing the unwanted edge cases later. You know, in ideal world where there is like okay. It's not ideal world.

In in a mythical world, where there is some one governing party, and it gets to decide everything, and there is no other country that can, you know, decide on their own, You could say, well, we need to calculate for all the consequences and only then, you know, maybe build this building, you know, by by replacing this park because, you know, maybe we need this park in the city. Right? So that kind of situation.

But when you're in a situation where you're in a forest in front of a wolf, you know, you first gonna deal with the wolf that wants to eat you, and then you're gonna go consult Greenpeace. So that's kind of situation that Ukraine is in. Okay.

Fair enough.

Sure. Well, look, it's all happened, that, my partners and I, we serve. So I started one company called the fourth law, and its goal was and is to make massively scalable on drone autonomy.

And then in parallel with that, together with my PACUBE cofounders, partners, and friends, we started another company called Odd Systems, which was focused on making thermal cameras. Cameras thermal cameras are seeing thermal radiation and are used to see at night. And we're now sort of those companies are getting closer and closer together, and we're probably gonna merge them.

And this this group of companies is currently the leading team in undrone AI and thermal imaging on a Ukrainian battlefield and likely one of the leading, if not the leading, in the world. So we have these, like, three sort of business units, which are cameras, drone autonomy, and drones. So the cameras and drone autonomy sell daytime and nighttime cameras and different types of drone autonomous modules to other drone manufacturers, over 200 drone manufacturers in Ukraine.

And then the the the UAV business unit sells the drones themselves to the armed forces of Ukraine, Ukrainian government. And there are different types of drones. There's a sort of front strike as we call them.

So those are sort of FPV strike drones and the the bombers, and then interceptors. And there are different kinds of interceptors. We do Shahen interceptors and we do ISR interceptors.

We don't do the deep strike What's an ISR interceptor?

some sort of Internal combustion engine? Yeah. Internal combustion engine.

Yeah. Are all the things you're talking about battery powered? Yeah.

What we're working on is all battery powered. Right? We we don't do the deep strikes.

Right?

Shahed interceptor like ours is called Zirov.

Eight. Like, an internal phase, it could be two eighty, but in in cruise phase, it's like two twenty ish. Okay.

Yeah. And sorry, I'm not like, you know, you can convert that into miles if you're interested.

That's easy. Yeah. I was saying that for for autonomy modules, right, we we make systems autonomous systems for frontline, for interceptors, some for deep strikes as well.

And then different levels of autonomy. So from terminal guidance, which is like last 500 meters give or take, to autonomous bombing, to autonomous target detection, to autonomous navigation, and all of that across day and night, different trains, different time of the year, different platforms like quadcopters and fixed wing, and maybe some other platforms. So this is quite a wide variety of products.

And we also have like our own simulation. We have our own training school for the war fighters. And we're we're about to start construction of two a semiconductor plants to make sensors for thermal cameras.

So that's super exciting for me as a computer science guy as, like, doing semiconductor.

and the other is a Yeah. Single tracking or without fiber optics. Fiber optics is just like a sort of a communication module.

Mhmm. So you can you can use classical analog video link and and and and radio link. Those those would be two separate radios.

You can do digital or you can do fiber optic. And then fiber optic has its own advantages, but also adds weight and decreases the distance and decreases how fast you can sort of turn and and move with the drone. Do you need AI for fiber optic drones?

Like, you can use AI for fiber optic drones. AI replaces a human. Right?

Fiber optic is making your communication link more resilient. So those are slightly different goals.

Yeah. Or, I guess, to counter those. Yeah.

I I think that's that's a correct assessment from sort of a public awareness standpoint. In practice, it's somewhat more difficult because besides electronic countermeasures, you have these issues of a radio horizon Mhmm. For FPV drones, which means that, you know, as I believe, earth is round.

Some people disagree. But basically, if you fly a drone and you have a land station over here and a drone flying over here, if your drone is flying high, you have good direct radio visibility. If your drone goes low, and usually, you know, Russian infantry and vehicles, they're on the ground, You wanna hit them, you need to go low.

Lower you go, maybe you'll you'll get behind a hill or behind a forest, and if you're far enough, you'll just get behind the curvature of the earth. You'll get into what's called a radio shadow. And then that is real bummer because for the last, be it 60 or 20 meters, you won't be able to see anything and it will be very difficult to hit the target.

So to counter that, what and then the distances that these FPV drones act on, they're they can be quite large. So for example, here in The US, there was this drone dominance program competition. And in drone dominance, the furthest distance was about 10 kilometers.

What was Drone Dominance? What was that Drone Drone Dominance is a is a program started by the US government to accelerate the development of drone technology here. And the longest range thing they were using was 10 kilometers.

Was 10 kilometers. Right? In in Ukraine, like, if your drone doesn't fly at least twenty, twenty five, it just no one's interested in it.

And the usual hits are happening it was like, okay, many hits are happening between thirty and forty kilometers. And that's what expected from a regular 10 inch FPV drone. So at that distance, even at altitudes of like 60 to 100 meters, you might start losing the the link.

So some some of the earlier AI technology that was fielded in FPV drone was this terminal guidance technology. That was the first product that we ever launched that helped you as an operator once you see the target from two, three, 500 meters, you lock onto the target and then it just drives the drone towards the target no matter what, even after you lost the the visual connection. So optic fiber solves that.

However, if you want to go, like, 20 kilometers with optic fiber, that will add an extra three kilos of useful weight to to your drone. So you So the cable that you have to unspool as you go a ways. Yeah.

Is heavy. Yeah. So at first, like, the spool is is about 800 grams, so a bit less than a kilo.

And then and then think about ten ten kilometer optic fiber is is another kilo, something like that. So so yeah, so that takes away from your useful mass, and then now you have like, you need a 15 inch drone, and it can only carry maybe one or two kilos of explosives if you wanna go, you know, 20 kilometers. If wanna go to 30 or four, like, 30 is probably max, 40 is like very problem problematic on optic fiber.

And then the problem with optic fiber is it's actually getting super expensive. So and you know why? Because because of all the data centers for AI.

Let's literally the same optic fiber that's been used there. So, like, when when Ukrainians and Russians come to Chinese factories to buy the optic fiber, they're like, we're out. We sold it out to the Americans.

You know? That's the craziest thing. So optic fiber went up in price from, like, $4 per kilometer to like $32 per kilometer in in in in a few months in the beginning of this year.

How how accurate is that? The Russians were the first ones to scale that. I think by as of now, Ukraine has catch caught up.

I think, like, as of maybe three months ago, Ukraine is mostly caught up on fiber optic.

Yeah. Well, for our for our audience, I I actually I cannot answer that question. Like, it's like, I know the answer, but I would not disclose that.

But for our audience, I think and another interesting fact is out of all the casualties on the frontline, between 7080% are done by FPV drones.

is a is a god of war because artillery used to cause like 80% of casualties. And now on that ranking, FPV drones rule. FPV drones are the god of war.

Sort of. Dethroned artillery. But it's not to say that artillery is not use useful, is not needed.

Like, all of these systems are needed. Maybe except cavalry, although Russians still use it. I don't know.

Have you seen the videos of Russians using mules and and horses? What is the usefulness of the tank in the That's modern that's where we need the Greenpeace to say a word, but they're silent. Fair.

It's diminishing. Diminishing. However, I I think there might be technologies which will revive the tank.

Look, tanks still provides you armor, and armor is important. Like, you still need to, you know, armor and firepower. Right?

Like, you you can be an armored personal carrier that provides you armor. The the challenge that currently exists is armor is not very well protected against incoming drones. However, there are ways to do to protect it.

We were previously talking about this before the podcast. The CEO of Raymetal recently sort of ridiculed Ukrainian drone industry saying that, like, there is nothing interesting there, no real innovation, no interest in, you know, compared to, like, Raymetal or Boeing. And it's all made by housewives.

So it was like, obviously, a ton of of memes about this, people ridiculing the CEO of Raymantel. And one of the best quotes I heard on this topic is from my my friend, Alexey Babenko, who's the head of and founder of Vereadrone, which is one of the largest manufacturers of FPV drones. They're our partner that are using our autonomy.

So he said that drones we manufacture in one day will be more than enough to destroy all the tanks for AE metal manufacturers in a year. And then, yeah, cost wise, of course, a drone is like $500 and a Raymetall tank is what probably 5,000,000 ish or maybe more. Don't mess with those housewives.

Yeah. Drone wives.

Well, look, I I think it's the same way how do we get to the point that calculators become irrelevant. Oh, now we have iPhones. Like, why would you need a calculator?

Technology progresses and it's it's insulins grows non linearly. It's all exponential. So I can tell you that full autonomy when you put it on a drone look.

So if you if you think about a tank and a drone, like, it's not a direct comparison, but even like a drone and an artillery shell or like sort of cost cost per kill, an artillery shell for one fifty five caliber, which is a standard NATO caliber, currently market price is about $4,000 per piece. So, you know, compare that to say $400 per drone, that's 10 times more expensive. It count for the amortization of the artillery gun, and for how vulnerable it is, and what is the sort of tactical capabilities gives you as compared to drone.

You'll figure out that an FPV drone is maybe three orders of magnitude more versatile, more useful, more capable than artillery. And and many of and classic artillery, many of the cases are different types of artillery, not just like one to one fifty five, you have mortars, all that. But give or take, you know, roughly three orders of magnitude maybe.

Again, it doesn't have that firepower. It's not one to one comparison, so Now take that FPV drone.

and sort of easiest pieces of autonomy that was fielded by us.

I think a good way to think about an FPV drone is like an iPhone of warfare. It's like very inexpensive, very mass producible, very versatile. You don't need a bunch of other things when you have iPhone in your pocket.

You don't have need an m p three player. You don't need a calculator. You don't need other things.

Alright? So after you draw on this an iPhone, or like, okay, Apple, please don't sue me, is a smartphone. And then when you add autonomy to it, it sort of becomes like Uber or ride sharing.

Okay? So what it means is instead of actually being a trained pilot who has this complex remote controller device, which requires couple months of training to actually pilot drone, and then having to pilot it for thirty minutes flying towards a target, etcetera, etcetera. Now you basically, you have your smartphone, you have a drone, you pick your smartphone, you say, we are here, the bad guys are here, go and get them.

And the drone goes up, flies in the given direction, localizes itself on the map, finds the dedicated area where the the bad guys are supposed to be, sees the bad guys, bombs them, return like, watches does does a damage assessment, returns back, sits down, then you can pick it up and and watch the video if you didn't have the radio link. Right? That's a bomber drone.

That's that's full autonomy for a bomber drone. Right? So you're saying that no human decision's made in this entire process?

That's not No human decision was made at the beginning of the process. The same way as you would fire an art artillery. When you fire an artillery, you don't stop at, like, 500 meters away from a target and ask it whether, you know, you want to strike or not.

Yeah. That's exact a human decision is always made at some point. Okay.

Right? Okay. So when you do that, that's full autonomy.

And such full autonomy is happening as we speak. And such full autonomy increases the capabilities of an FPV drone, which is already like three orders more powerful than an artillery shell. Full autonomy increases its capabilities by four orders of magnitude, because now you can have 100 times as many people who can use it, because you don't need to train those people.

And this is important. You can have 10 times mission success rate, and you can have 10 times utility per per drone, because now instead of being one way kamikaze, it's it can be a bomber. Now wait.

They they don't care about the radio horizon. They don't lose track during navigation. They are not susceptible to human error when, you know, an artillery shell or other drone blows up besides you and you're like, hell no.

Like, I'm getting out of here. Right? That doesn't happen to an autonomous drone.

Like, all of those things. Like, we have, like, one of the brigades that's using our drones was just first level autonomy. They they literally said that their success rate What's first level autonomy?

First level autonomy is just the terminal guidance. K. Yeah.

By the way, we we have a video of that. We can watch that. Terminal guidance means a human gets it nearby and then the AI takes over.

Yeah. So the the human flies it all the way, like, 30 kilometers towards the target. And obviously, the target was probably given to that human by someone who's flying some ISR drone, some reconnaissance drone.

Right? So all the way through the target, once you see the target from the distance of 500 meters, you do target lock, and from there, drone flies autonomous. So just that feature alone, it has increased the guy's call sign as Grom.

So it has increased his mission success rate, like like precision mission mission success rate from 20% to 71%. And it also increased his kill zone from three kilometers to 10 kilometers. Which means there is certain area around the frontline which is designated kill zone.

Whenever enemy goes into that area, it's it's almost guaranteed to be to be destroyed by by a drone. And then obviously the drones are not launched from like the zero line, they're usually launched from like minus 10 kilometres. What is the zero line?

Yeah. I have a guess of a mission success. I mean, well well, yeah.

But I could Get them. Yeah. Yeah.

I know. But that's a very good question, in fact, because even if you fly into the target well, first, the target can be damaged or destroyed. Those are two different modes.

Then there can be different targets. You know, a a sole infantryman is one kind of target. A dugout where supposed the the there are some enemies there is another kind of target, and some mechanical equipment is another type of target.

Radio emitting equipment, which, like, often, like, the targets that the military want to get more than anything else is the some enemy radio tower or something like that or some some small radio dish that really makes life difficult in that area, in that commentary. So those are different targets. Right?

It can be destroyed, it can be damaged. Then sometimes the drone hits but doesn't explode. Like, that happens.

And then there are other failure modes. You didn't even reach the target because you were a, jammed by electronic warfare. B, you lost the control over drone because of the radio horizon.

C, you were jammed by a different type of electronic warfare that happens way before you hit the target area. No. It's impacting your video video receiver.

So it's like jamming on video or jamming on the controller, two diff different types of jamming. Then something malfunctioned on a drone, just a mechanical malfunction, maybe like a motor broke or like whatever. So all of those are different failure modes.

Yeah. Or maybe you got lost. You're navigate navigating to to your to your target.

You know, that happens too.

basically, you manage to point in a direction. Yeah. You go there, and then the last mile is the drone taking over.

So we we we define this like, I define that, but it sort of got picked up by the industry. We define five levels of autonomy. So level one is terminal guidance.

It's what we've just discussed. Level two is bombing. Level three is autonomous target detection and engagement decision.

Level four is autonomous navigation. Level five is autonomous takeoff and landing. So Those are good things to know.

Those are five levels of autonomy. Now if you want into. Yeah.

Sorry. Like, let me finish with a theoretical part. So What is Tesla running at right now?

Tesla? No. Sorry.

Well, that's that's very good point. Like, it's it's it's exactly it was inspired by the levels of self driving autonomy. Waymo's level five.

Right? Mhmm. You just tell it where you wanna go, it picks you up and then you if you if you look at the the classic definitions of self driving cars, Waymo is still like level four because it still requires even remote but still like human control.

So like if Waymo gets in trouble, there is an operator who takes over and resolves this. So it'll still be level four. It doesn't map directly, but it's also five levels.

Can I can I interject a question?

what it hit? Like, does it just transmit back or do you sort of like lose track of it and hope it hit? Like, what what happens to that?

That's a great question. So In another drone. Like, the current battlefield in Ukraine, it's saturated with different types of drones.

So, obviously, you have all the FPV drones. And, you know, last year alone, Ukraine manufactured about 4,000,000 of these, and then Russia's maybe, like, 20% less than that. And for this year, the publicly voiced target was 7,000,000 on Ukrainian side.

So it's, like, serious numbers. We're getting serious numbers here. And then besides those, there are different reconnaissance drones, ISRs, we call them, and there are sort of tactical level ISR where we both Ukrainians and Russians usually use Mavic drone by DGI.

And then there are a bunch of locally produced drones, which are sort of fixed wing drones that can stay in the air for much longer than Mavic. Maybe maybe, like, half an hour, and then, you know, there are drones that can stay for many hours or even up to a day. And those drones have are more expensive, have more expensive cameras, etcetera, etcetera.

We hunt those drones that Russians launch, Russians hunt our drones and so on. But ideally ideally, when you are a group of soldiers operating in FPV, you'll have someone in your company or someone in your platoon who has an ISR asset that will do target designation for you. They'll they'll say, oh, like, there's there's a Russian vehicle over there.

Go and get them. And you go there, you get it, and they're like, okay.

they have, like, a carousel of drones because, like, one maybe cannot stay more than 30. So, like Right. They're just constantly surveilling the battles.

Yeah. Almost every spot on the battlefield. But it's not always the case.

Sometimes you will not have a surveillance essence. So then you would launch another FPV just to confirm that there was a And then if you see there was a hit and you're not sure if it completely destroyed, you may be hit again for good measure. Double tap.

Yeah. So that's how it works. But I was about to give you another sort of piece of taxonomy.

So you have five levels of autonomy. Right? And then you have sort of eight dimensions of autonomous battlefield.

So what is eight dimensions? It's crucial to understand how autonomy evolves in a modern battlefield environment. So dimension number one is level of autonomy.

You know, what are the capabilities that your asset has? Dimension number two is a platform you're operating on. So it can be a quadcopter, a fixed wing drone, different types of, you know, maybe like long range drone or short range drone, but it can also be a missile.

You're gonna have autonomy even on an artillery shell or a ground vehicle, or a sea vehicle. So all of those are different platforms. Level three would be domain.

So it's ground to ground or ground to air as an interception. Ground to sea or sea to air. They're all like all the nuances with with different domains.

Then level four would be higher levels of autonomy, such as swarming, drone carriers, drone nests. And now when you're saying level, you're talking about dimensions, not about the I mean I mean the mean dimension. Yeah.

Yeah. Used to say was supposed to say dimension. I say dimension because each of them works with another.

Right? So you you might have, like, third level autonomy, fixed wing drone, operating in land to air, and stuff like that. Right?

And then operating in a swarm or operating from a nest. Alright? Then you have sort of dimension number five is environment.

So is it day or night? Is it summer or winter? Is it humid, cold, dry?

What kind of target is it? Is your target hiding in a forest? Or is it, you know, behind a hill or within buildings?

So all of that is environment. Then you have dimension number six is command and control. How are you dealing with mill or like, you know, tens of thousands of those assets around the battlefield?

How are you coordinating that on the higher levels of command? Are you collecting data? All that.

Dimension number seven would be infrastructure. So things like simulation, data collection tools, security, deployment mechanisms, etcetera. So all those systems have to be developed separately and integrate with all of the others.

And finally, dimension number eight is sort of distribution. Have you deployed 100 of these systems or 100,000 of these systems? Because those are two very different ball games.

So that now gives you a more broad overview of how autonomy propagates across the battle space.

Well, I was like, mortar fire, give or take half half a kilometer. Could be, you know, plus or minus. So maybe you fire one and then you fire another.

So drones are actually a much better in in being precise in those scenarios. And I think, know, to your point, I think five to ten years from now, it will be immoral to use weapons without AI. Because weapons without AI will be more likely to cause collateral damage or unwanted damage.

Same way it will be immoral to drive your own car manually on a public road. Because it's it's more likely to cause unwanted damage.

Yeah. That's definitely coming. Anyway No.

But that's you know, that's an obvious an obvious thought. I agree with you. Yeah.

AI general. Well, the most important thing to ask ourselves is who will be faster to that, us or our adversaries?

Yeah. Technically, they could could could be done now. The the question is, of course, there's, you know, some engineering work to be done.

The bigger challenge is deployment. Right? So okay.

Technically, you know, yeah, like operation in Iran, right? They they, you know, publicly it was claimed that a Puncture system was used for target designation, etcetera, etcetera. So it it is not exactly as you say the the AI makes all the decisions.

But basically, AI goes through all the data you have, gives you these 1,027 different targets, and says you, to confirm, please press okay. And you look at the targets and you're like, yeah, sounds right. Press okay.

So that that's I think that's where we are now already or we were a couple weeks ago as we're recording this on April 10. Another question is, you know, how massively deployable it is? Is it like every decision being made like that?

Or is it like just some of the decisions made like that? And then different levels of command and control, you know, there you have like the the platoon, the company level, the the battalion, etcetera etcetera etcetera. But but, you know, the the tricky thing here when we get into that territory, the tricky thing is if your enemy is getting advantage of being thousand times faster than yourself by deploying such systems, you know, what do you do?

if if enemy starts deploying level six autonomy as you call it, and you have not started doing that You're in trouble. Yes. Exactly.

So you have to catch up. So my point is that it is very important to think about the safety of these systems, but that thinking should not slow you down in developing them because they are critical for your existential survival. Right?

And like, one person who doesn't think doesn't get to think about the ethics of the war is that person. That person surely doesn't doesn't get to think about it. What would be the safety risk of such a system?

Well, of course. Fire? Just wrong decisions.

Right? Oh, I see. You know, maybe, you know, these decisions And I decided to squeeze out drone army to kill The decisions will not only be made about drones.

They they are likely to made about what the humans should do on on your side as well.

dead like dead zones and there are no civilians. There are virtually no no civilians close to the frontline because like super dangerous, everyone has evacuated from there. But there are other environments which are more like, okay, there's a counter terrorist operation, there's like a group of terrorists, or like group of civilians, or like like the rest operations in Iran, I imagine that The US and Israeli forces do not want to harm civilians, they only only only targeted the military targets there.

Right? So in those situations, it's it's a different level of responsibility for that decision making as well. And then there are just such a big variety of those military missions.

And I'm not even like well informed or well educated in military science to tell you about all those scenarios. We would need to, you know, put put some some general besides me, and maybe a Ukraine general and American general would would have told you very different stories about these things.

know, if there is a guy in a dugout with with some bullets and automatic weapon, the other guy cannot come and take that that that dugout.

There's this whole layer of the modern culture, a modern Ukraine culture built around the war related stuff. So there is this punk rock band that is called s z c. I guess in English that would be.

Which which stands short for like, a deserter or something like that. So anyhow, this band has a song titled 2030. And it's basically about the year 2030, and the war still still goes on.

It's like the the the whatever, third world, world war or whatever. And they they basically they sing about the AI and, like, cyborgs and everything. But the simple infantry is still needed, and we're still, getting cold in those dugouts, and we're still doing our job.

That's that's sort of the the theme of the song. And it seems like that's actually what's gonna happen.

You know, I'm I'm I'm very much interested in following the whole humanoid robot theme and

There there is a lot of utility in humanoid robots because the world is designed around humanoids. So I would not, like, 100% disqualify the possibility that I know sometimes ten years in the future, humanoid robots will be actually fighting. So that's that's an actual Terminator kind of scenario.

And look, the cost of large language models of running them is getting so low. You can have basically an inexpensive computer running, you know, what was a state of the art model year and a half ago, running it locally on a device with an open source model, which also means that the Chinese can have it, the Russians can have it, the North Koreans can have it, etcetera. So that is already possible.

And with when when when we're looking at the acceleration of of the neural nets, you know, I would have if not the acceleration of of of the large language models, I would have said that, you know, I I don't think that humanoid robots will be able to be useful in the battlefield earlier than in ten years. But, you know, if you account for the exponential, it might be, you know, five years or so. The problem with all of the autonomous systems and it's like starts with self driving cars and even even with all the AI, like modern day AI agents, to make them really useful, you have to solve such a long tail of edge cases that it's really difficult to make them useful.

Like we were promised, you know, self driving cars, what like 2007, Sebastian Truman and Google, and even before that, all the challenges, everything. And Elon of course told us it's gonna be, you know, one year from 2014. And now we still don't have self driving Teslas everywhere.

We have Waymo's and SF and some other places. But they're still like not not perfect. So I think, you know, I expect something similar from self flying drones and fully autonomous drones.

And we saw that firsthand as with each level of autonomy that we're adding, there is a very wide distance between a prototype and something that is ready to be scaled to millions of units, and something that has been scaled to millions of units. But but the the the race with, like, AI coding tools is just insane. So things might accelerate very fast, faster than we can imagine.

level one autonomy as you've defined it is actually very natural. Like, you basically are just solving an image recognition and tracking system. Yeah.

You know, it's it's actually interesting that you say it that way. And I I thought about this this the very same way. And we have this joke that there are, like, 200 companies in Ukraine, which are trying to solve last mile targeting or terminal guidance.

It seems like we're, like, the only company that actually solved that. Because even that's I don't think it's trivial, but it's at least something that you imagine given our and Eric Schmidt. Like, Eric Schmidt's companies are are pretty good.

I, like, I actually have lots of respect to what they're doing, and they're they have been practically influential and helpful on the battlefield, and they have good engineering.

Like, the more the more complex behavior you're trying to simulate, the the more edge cases there are. Right? The the more ways to do it wrong there are.

And then there are different approaches. It's like, if you think about, if you read academic papers about robotics, right, you sort of the robot is represented as some something that has the the sort of sensor input, and then you have three levels of sort of logics or or decision making, which are perception, planning, control. And then you have actuators as output.

So, you know, pre neural nets, you would do perception, output, and control all with classic logics. Right? Then, you know, with AlexNet and computer vision, you you could do perception with neural nets and the rest with logic.

You cannot currently do each of those separately with neural nets, each of those separately with logics, or you can just have one huge neural net that just takes lots of sensory data. It's not just pixels. It could be sound.

It could be accelerometer. It could be everything as input and just outputs the controls. And I know some of the self driving car companies are doing that or, like, experimenting between different ways of doing that.

So you can also, like, think about that. And the way you implement those features also influences how much degrees of freedom the system would have. Right?

Like control, you can do it classical algorithmic control with common filters and PAD filter PAD controllers, etcetera. Or you can do a neural net that that was trained in a gym with a reinforcement learning, etcetera. And those would be two different behaviors of the system.

Yeah. Okay. I maybe my point was just It was like much more high level.

Can, like, if if you go even, like if if you go high level, you can you can, like, try to, like, have whatever, like, and folks who are doing, like, physical sort of World models. World models. Right.

Physical intelligence. They they are trying to make this big big models and sort of understand the world. And and then supposedly have such model and you can tell a drone, okay, like, go over over that hill and, like, find the bay bad guys and then get them.

Or make me a video and make me a photo of the guy smiling and get back to me. Right? That's one way.

Another way you have, like, these subsystems, like, one is navigation, another is finding the person, another is, like, getting to them to take a photo. And those are, again, very different behaviors. And then it's not that one is necessarily better than than the other, and we might have more technological ability to do one or another.

But all of those systems will exist. And then, again, you should always keep in mind that it's only the not only the good guys that are developing these systems, the bad guys are developing these these systems as well. Yeah.

I guess where I'm going with this back to Noah's original thought with the end of the, you know, end of the soldier. And so in order to replace Or at least the end the rifleman, let's Or at least the of the rifleman. Yeah.

Yeah. I'm I'm not seeing that very close. And it was like, I'm you know, as much as I'm I'm a lover of sci fi and all of that and a technologist, The more I I I try to be like, the the the I try try try to have certain humility about these things and, like, the the military domain, and there was just so much human history and blood and tears dedicated to sort of understanding this art of war and perfecting it and and so on.

There is so much knowledge in there that I don't feel like I I even started to comprehend a lot of that. But one thing that I really understood is that even though drones are now making 80% of of of the casualties, you go to the actual officers, you you you talk to the actual like brigade commanders, corps commanders, and they explain to you how all of it fits together. How when you're thinking about an operation that involves a couple thousand people to, you know, get get this piece of land out of the enemy's hands, de occupy it.

How it is so complex, it involves, you know, dozens of different types of drones, and then land operations, and reconnaissance operations, psychological operations, and then aviations, and tanks, and logistics, and all kinds of these different assets. So motor warfare is really very complex and the fact that the drones are the latest coolest thing and then the AI is essentially the latest coolest thing, doesn't mean that now it's all that and only that. Right?

So yeah. Whoever's looking into that, I I think should should realize that it's it's not just what the press talks about. The the reality is much more difficult, much more complex.

Yeah. Well, let me start with a saying that although China does not sell directly to Ukraine and it does sell directly to Russia, A lot of Ukraine's supply chains, they start in China. Right?

And we're not in the conflict with China, and we would not want to be in a conflict with China. And we'd hope that China stays in neutral power between Ukraine, Russia and The US as well. That said, the scenario that you're describing, everything is much much much worse.

So think about this. Last year, Ukraine produced 4,000,000 FPV drones. Ukraine is not the most industrious nation in the world.

China can produce 4,000,000,000 of these FPV drones. China can make them not drones with propellers, but fixed wing drones, which go not 40 kilometers far, but maybe two or 300 kilometers inland. Slightly more expensive.

With internal combustion? Or No. No.

With Battery powered restring drums. Yeah. Yeah.

Battery. Yeah. You know mean?

Propulsion system on those propellers?

You have that. They can also make them all fully autonomous. They have DGI, the world's most advanced drone company.

They can make them fully autonomous without GPS, without anything. And then they can put those drones on, you know, maybe tens of thousands of fully autonomous underwater submarines, Or maybe not even that, just on shipping containers. And, you know, barges that ship goods for freight ships.

And then they show up with millions of drones packed onto those sea vessels. They show up to any coastline in the world, be it Taiwan or be it California. And they have millions of long range impactors targeted at a piece of land.

What do you do with that? There are not enough hunter submarines, there are not enough anti Ship missiles. Yeah, anti ship missiles, anti ship planes.

They can produce these assets on in tens of thousands of factories because they're so simple to produce that, you know, even the if if the FBI director picks a phone, calls to the president of The United States says, hey, the scenario Yaroslav was warning us about is beginning to unfold. We need to do a preemptive strike. You wouldn't have enough assets to do preemptive strikes because there can be like tens of thousands of places where these things are being manufactured.

And then so to contract a scenario like that, we would need to have like a similar amount of mass You mean similar number of drones? Yes. To intershaft that, like either in sea or in in air, etcetera, at a similar cost.

Right? So economics should should work out. I'll tell you that currently, we in the West, and we in The United States, we don't have the technology to do that.

Like autonomy, master on manufacturing,

Well, I think so if Because our computer vision algorithms are not as good? It's not only about the computer vision algorithms. It's like the the like, if if if a group of companies by Eric Schmidt founded two or three years ago, and my small small startup, no, I was like maybe not as small, but it's also founded three years ago, Are sort of two of the leading companies in the world, maybe couple others who are capable or something like that, but not really on small drones.

I I do think we'll we were behind China in technology. So we lack technology. We lack mass manufacturing capacity.

We lack the components. And we lack the rare earth materials. So there are four layers in which we're behind this challenge.

And that's why it is my point that we in the in the West and especially in The States, we should there should be far more smart people working in defense and should be more funding. If we want to keep the resemblance of our good past life.

Look. I I don't I don't think we have all the information to claim that, but we cannot count it out. And that alone should be, you know, a big warning sign.

We have not seen a Chinese drones in action. We've seen some of the Iranian drone in action and Russian drones in action. Not Chinese really.

Not seen Chinese forces in action. Obviously, hopefully this never happens, but the conflict of a scale US China, there are many sort of classical assets that, you know, we should not discount as we just discussed. We should not discount artillery in the land war.

We should not discount, you know, air air carrying groups and, you know, the the the air force and long range missiles and and electronic warfare and satellites, etcetera. But then there are also things that, you know, we, at least we as a general public, don't really know about China. I'm sure there's a lot of information that the US intelligence has about the Chinese capabilities.

But, yeah, I think if you if you get back to the scenario that I just described, and if you take that, like, sort of to the maximum, do you basically see that whoever has bigger manufacturing capacity, that side wins.

or what you know, we're cybercriminal. Look. I totally agree with your sentiment.

I know they're down in El Segundo or whatever, like somewhere in South California. What are the most pressing choke points besides rare earths that everyone talks about? Yeah.

You know, that's one of the pieces that we do thermal cameras. That's like actually a big one. Thermal cameras.

Yeah. Then, like, the the motors, like, you you need the cement special have the magnets, then you turn them into a really good boat. Yeah.

Yeah. You you have you need these special magnets, and then that's sort of your rare earth component. Right.

Like, rare earth is not that, oh, like, there are these metals that only for for some reason, God only put them under the Chinese territory and not not under any others. No. Like, they're distributed.

There are plenty of them around Earth. It's it's about the refining capabilities and, like, investing into that and and so on. And then, like, frankly at some point, we don't have that many humans, like, that's where the humanoid robots help.

Like, China is a big populous country. The the population of, like, United West is comparable to that, but the population of The US is much slower than that. And I definitely think that, you know, the the whole West should get their act together because, you know, Ubisan par Victoria Ibis Concordia, there's always victory where there is agreement.

So I think we we we serve as as a free nations of the world, we should get their act together because freedom is what what unites us. And I'm, you know, I'm I'm also like pretty mad at what's happening in the European Union. And I think that, you know, current US administration is the best thing that has ever happened to Europe since World War two probably, or since possible World two because World War two wasn't the best thing.

Trump withdrawing the image of omnipotent American support forced the Europeans to get their butts in gear, unite, and Yeah. And also, like, doing that not in a nice way. Right?

Like, when JD Vans came to Munich Forum one year ago, he wasn't, like, super nice. Like, oh, please, our European friends, please, could you please increase your defense spending? He was somewhat pushy.

Let's put it that way. And that I I think that was a necessary measure. Like, I've been I've been thinking about that.

Could it could it have been he maybe he could have been nicer. I was like, no. Because, like, the voters of European leaders, the European countries, would have not understood this.

They they would not get the message. And now I think the message was gotten across, but Europe is still sort of slow to wake up. I would put it that way.

Things are getting better, but I'm not happy about the speed of how they're getting better. So when I when I like, when I would go to some of the European capitals, I'll get back pretty depressed from, like, talking to their, you know, military officials and their entrepreneurs, etcetera. Here, I've been in The US for the last month or so, I'm not not depressed.

I'm actually I'm I'm actually excited. I still think you should, like, 10 x the effort in sort of making sure that you remain the the the strongest power in in the world, and you can defend your values, etcetera. But but I'm I'm very optimistic.

And definitely, once we are in danger, I think, or just like lots of very smart people in the West who can figure these things out. But people in China are also extremely smart. It's it's very different from even the Cold War sort of situation, like Soviet Union was economically very declining power.

China is not like that. And then if if we look at, you know, electric car race, I think they're ahead of The US and ahead of the whole world, definitely ahead of Europe, which used to be sort of a car superpower. When you look at AI, I think they're almost where we are, maybe slightly behind.

When you look at humanoid robotics, I would argue that they're ahead. And in many other, like, in, like, medicine and biosciences, there's lots of interesting things there. And, like, in consumer space, are lots of interesting things there.

I don't know if you heard this podcast called nine ninety six. I don't know if if it's still airing or not. There used to be a fantastic podcast by some American American Chinese businessman, maybe venture funds.

About Chinese economy? About about China from a sort of tech venture point of view. So and I I lived in China for maybe four months, and I visited a couple times.

But even even the WeChat is, like, such a more advanced app than anything we have in the West. So we it's very important not to be too arrogant. And I think we're guilty of that, like, definitely in The US.

You know, Sometimes we tend to be too arrogant, like, I I think, like, humility helps always, at least to me personally. Yeah. And then I I think, like, we don't have to we don't have to obviously be enemies.

So, you know, like, with Ukraine and Russia, it's like Russia came to kill all of these people and get all this territory. With China and The US, it's not like that. And thanks God, it's not like that.

Right? It might be with China and Taiwan. Maybe.

Hopefully not. Yeah. I think, you know, hopefully not.

China has their own, you know, problems probably with with the human rights, etcetera. But, you know, hopefully, it's still not beyond the fixing point. Hopefully.

Hopefully. But we we should we should be armed. Right?

We should we should be ready to whatever. And then that alone decreases the probability of any conflict. If you're weak, you're basically provoking the conflict.

The problem with Europe these days is that, like, last year, Ukraine and Russia went in drone technology of 2025 to drone technology of 2026. Europe went from winter of twenty twenty two to spring of twenty twenty two. So the gap Europe didn't even make one year of progress.

The and The US, I would argue, made less than a year of progress as well in in the last year. So the gap, the technological gap, is getting wider and wider and wider. And at some point, like, I'm looking at Poles.

Poles who are, like, very close to us and close to Russia. Polish Polish people, not surveys. Yeah.

Yeah. Sorry. Sorry.

Not my first language. When I'm looking at the Poles, what do they what are they saying? Well, Polish people, Poland.

I know Pulton is the right word. Yeah. I know.

I'm looking at them and they bought like a 100 tanks and four submarines. I was like, dudes, you don't have like a thousand people who know how to operate in FPV. What the hell you're doing?

They're doing From what I can see, they're not not doing it right. And the problem is they'll they'll be in a situation where they're so proud of their winged gussars and, like, their their cavalry, and the enemy is attacking with airplanes and tanks. That that's literally like the the gap is getting wider between Russia and That happened in 1939.

I don't want that to happen again.

Yeah. Well, look, I I really like this quote. I think it's by Arthur Seclar that the future is already here.

It's just not evenly distributed yet. And just the same way as Silicon Valley as as this sort of future location for all things tech. Kyiv and Ukraine is sort of the defense valley.

It's it's it's the the point where the future of defense has already arrived. And there is a ton of things to learn from that, starting with particular, you know, hundreds of companies in in very particular fields to the battlefield experience. From battlefield commanders of every level, starting from soldiers, surgeon to to platoon level commander to brigade level commander, special forces and and and intelligence, all of that.

To how the government organizes the sort of the infrastructure and and sort of the the playing ground for all these businesses to to flourish, etcetera. So I I would definitely look into much tighter integration and exchanging the experience and so on. That would be one thing.

You know, I think reform and procurement would be another thing. And I think that's what is currently being done with Drone Dominance. I think Pete Hackett is is leading that and maybe some other people in the administration.

I think that's extremely sort of powerful and right thing to do. And they they should scale at big times. Well, obviously, you know, any any sort of military person would say, well, yes.

Okay. You're you're fine. Cool.

But, you know, Ukraine and its war theater is very, very much different from, I know, potential scenarios that US might have to fight. And and, yes, I agree. But there is still so much to learn even, like, from the sea warfare that that Ukraine is is doing and then long long range drones like these Shayhats that unfortunately damaged some of the American equipment in The Middle East.

They can fly up to 2,000 kilometers. So like if you think about in the Pacific region, like 2,000 kilometers, that covers a lot of land with all the like islands and aircraft carriers. Well, I think America is learning that lesson right now in Iran in The Middle East.

Well, you would think so. But then, I mean, I'm not sure. It's like there was so many chances to learn that lesson from Ukraine before, and I don't think it was, like, fully learned.

So I'm not sure how fully learned the Middle East lessons were. Perhaps losing a war to a minor power will teach America.

there are so many lessons to be taken from this, like Russia and much bigger power attacking Ukraine, you know, given the same logic that we discussed, whoever has more production capacity should win. But then Russia didn't achieve victory in Ukraine, and then the US didn't get, like, full victory in Iran, probably achieved some of the goals, but probably not all of them. So that also, you can flip that.

Like when you say, okay, what if China has so much more capacity than The US? What if they attack us for whatever reason? How can we hold them back if we don't have the rare earths?

Partially, yes. But then if you think about Ukraine in 02/22/2022 to, you know, first half year or year, wasn't much reliance on Chinese supply chain. We were just relying on whatever we we've got.

So that's one side of things. Another side of things is basically how much suffering can you withstand along multiple axis. It's not just the military axis, it's also like the economic axis and the political axis, I would I would argue.

So like, one of the reasons why worse stop or start is because the political pressure on the leadership internally in the country is so high that you just have to stop that. Right? So I think that differs big times from whether you were the one who's seen by the population as the party which started the conflict, or the one who was attacked.

That's one part. Another, just by overall state of the society, like, and one thing I'm worried about in Europe now, that people are not ready to fight even if they're attacked. Like, when people are asked about that, they're like, oh, I'm just gonna move to somewhere where there's like less, there's no war.

So that's a challenge. And that's what makes Europe weaker right now. And, you know, The US didn't really have to ever, I think, fight a foreign war on its own turf.

I hope that never happens. But in case that would have happened, I don't know what what would be, you know, how would the rich cities of East or West Coast, how would people behave? Like, would would all the Wall Street bankers and Silicon Valley VCs, you know, mobilize and really start working on on defense stuff?

I I I would love to think so.

In a way, but look, like, it wasn't that that clear in World War two. And like, Churchill was like famously said, America will always make the right decision after trying all the wrong ones. Right?

And it's like, one could argue that there is this sort of this USA that lives in popular culture and was sort of created by Hollywood's, like cool dudes that will always come and do the right thing. Right? And then if you if you look at like international politics, it doesn't necessarily always look like that, you know, like the Budapest Memorandum, like Ukraine gave all of its nuclear weapons, the second worst, third largest nuclear arsenal, you know, because The US and and and Russia and the others were very persuasive, and they're like, yeah, just get it away, we we guarantee your security.

And they're like, oh, it's not guarantees, it's assurances. We use the word assurances. So therefore, we didn't promise you much, you just gave it away for free.

Then like, Russia tax, so like, no reaction. So the whole world, like, 2022, the whole world looks at it and it's, like, oh, okay. So maybe we should get nukes.

But obviously Yeah. Ukraine should as well. But can't Someone someone someone could argue that if if a country currently doesn't work on their own nuclear program, they're doing a disservice to their country and the government should be fired.

Like, because it seems like from the recent world history that that that is like the only way to actually provide credible deterrence. Alright? So I guess, I think, like, in Europe, people are not quite sure how will America behave.

Will it behave as the Hollywood hero? Or will it behave pragmatically as it did at the beginning of World War two? Or as it did, you know, with when when Ukraine was attacked by Russia and, you know, the The US just decided to sort of push the Budapest Memorandum aside because, of course, Russia's nuclear power and, like, we don't wanna mess with it.

or more? Yeah. I think give or take.

Yeah. Yeah. 30 versus like 120 ish.

Yeah. Yeah.

More help from China.

Yeah. Look, I think it's awesome for for our listeners. It's helpful to understand that there are at least 30 different types, categories of drones.

Right? Like, you have if you if you first, you have, like, different domains. You have flying drones, ground vehicles, and you have sea vehicles, and you have undersea vehicles.

Right? Then for each of those domains, you have multiple use cases. Like for ground vehicles, you have logistics, evacuation, mining, demining yeah, like maybe something else.

For aerial you have reconnaissance, front strike, mid strike, deep strike, mining, demining, radio repeating, kamikaze and bombing, ISR, different types of surveillance. So tactical surveillance, operational level surveillance, maybe strategic level surveillance at some point. Logistics also with aerial drones.

For sea drones, same thing. So in each of those categories, have dozens, sometimes over a 100 companies and products which compete. So that's the current Ukrainian battlefield.

From the Russian side, it's less of a zoo, as we say. So they in each category, they usually have one, two, maybe three products. And then they scale it sort of in a centralized fashion.

And then so when you talk about whether we are behind or who's behind or or ahead in drone warfare, you gotta analyze that It's asymmetric. Area by area. Right?

So if you're, like, talking about their front strike, I would argue that Ukraine has gotten ahead recently with after scaling the fiber optic. Before that, Russia was slightly slightly ahead. So so Ukraine got ahead.

With like mid strikes, something like 40 to 200 kilometers. It's hard for me to judge. At some point, Russia was was ahead.

I think maybe we're we're getting ahead as well. And Deep Strike recently got ahead. So we were we were doing more damage to Russia with Deep Strike drones than they're doing to us.

In sea drones, we're consistently ahead, always were ahead. In ground drones, I think we're ahead. Yeah.

Think like on like Where are they still ahead? In general, I think we're we're ahead. Or they where they're still ahead.

I think in certain parts of the components, like GPS free navigation, like these CRPA antennas are really good. They have these winged bombs that they drop from their bomber planes. I forgot the English name for it.

Glide bomb? Yeah. Sort of.

Yeah. So they're ahead on that side and it's like it's difficult to protect from those.

It can be pretty big. I think it's like can be up to 80 kilometers. Yeah.

And then obviously, the range Like a fighter plane, like a strike? Yeah. The range is is a very iffy subject here because the range is is like basically the distance from where you drop the bomb to where it lands, but also you drop it from from a fire plane, and then fire planes are susceptible to aerial interceptor missiles.

So on our side we have our own fire planes and we have the ground anti air systems. And then and then those two assets, they have their radars and radar fields. And then, you know, depending on the enemy tactics you can, you know, calculate how big is the aerial area that you cover with those assets.

And look, you know, I'm not a professional military guy, so I'm covering these topics in a layman terms. Don't quote me on this. I'm just trying this to make this as understandable to an average listener as as possible.

Yeah. Look, helicopters are also versatile assets. Front strike helicopters, I think we're we're gonna be seeing fewer and fewer of them.

These few Russian helicopters that Ukraine's intercepted with drones were more like edge cases than a systematic sort of helicopter hunting campaign. I think it is possible to turn it into a systematic countermeasure against helicopters.

Potentially. And there are there are, like, so many different scenarios. Like, you can have large aerial drone carriers carrying interceptor drones.

That then go hit the helicopters. For example. Or or you can have battery powered interceptor drones, but not of a missile with a propeller type as many of these well known drones like STNG or P1 Sun.

They look like basically a missile with a quadcopter behind it. But you you can also have plane or like fixed wing like aerial interceptors.

I mean, like in theory, can imagine that. But but it Or like surface it's just like A drone that carries surface to air missiles somehow. Yeah.

I don't think that's very practical because whatever you have going on land will be just super slow and not fast enough to to be able to hunt down a helicopter.

you know, low and then launch its little missile, like a flying missile platform. In theory, but like a big part of a mission like that is not just kinetically getting to a helicopter, but also identifying it, you know, either by means of first radar and then visually, and placing the asset you have, the interception asset you have in the right place in the right time. So the combination of the of those things is much more complex than just, you know, how can we strike it like from behind or from below.

But then helicopters are not that does not mean they're becoming, like, completely useless. Like, for example, helicopters are used to intercept deep strike drones. Like Ukraine uses a lot of helicopters to shoot down Shaheeds.

And Russia uses helicopters to shoot down our deep strike drones.

weapon that people use against him. Why aren't they very good? They're they're they're pretty good.

Like, there are there are like hundreds, maybe thousands of cases of drones being shut down with shotguns both by definitely thousands, but both by Ukrainians and Russians. Alright. It's even, like, statistics of, like, what is the percentage of Ukraine FPV drones that didn't accomplish the mission because they were shut down by a shutdown?

Got it.

pilot group, and they told me, like, there was this Russian guy. He was just like, Rambo. Is he like they're like, he shot down, like, seven FPV drones.

They couldn't they couldn't get him. They finally got him, but it was like nothing they've seen before. Right?

Like Got it. But your average non Rambo.

it's it's always like electronic countermeasures are used all across the frontline.

Well, look, if your system jams the frequency the drone works on and the drone doesn't have optic fiber or a last mile autonomy, then you have a 100% chance that it will it will not fly towards you. But then what is the chance to to to not have drone that can either use different frequency or autonomy or fiber optic? Well, that depends on the on the area you're in and who's who's who's your adversary in that area, in that zone.

Well, let's I guess this question was maybe too dumb that I was trying to ask. No. It's it's a great question.

There are no dumb questions here. And it's just like my answers, if you feel the common theme here is that things in practice and war, things are way, way, way more complex than they Okay.

Yeah. I mean, it's it's just like a guided guided bomb flying at you and it knows exactly where you are. Right?

It's not that it's it's the ultimate weapon, but I think, like, one of the things that went viral in in Ukraine defense tech bubble even before the words of the CEO of Raynmetall was some American tank battle tank pilot who was interviewed and he was he was asked whether he's afraid of FPV drones. And he's like, no. It's so we have our tanks are strong.

And that that went viral among Ukrainians because they're like, dude, you have no idea what you're talking about. Like, don't mess with those drones. Like, you know, Abrams tank, great tank, but against an FB drone, sorry, dude.

I was like, maybe not not from one drone, but it was like, a dozen drones will will take it out. So yeah. But there is hope.

So you just have to have kinetic countermeasures.

Well, it can mean many things. So if you if you go to Ukrainian East and sort of territories close to the front lines, I think, like, about 50 kilometers in from the front line, all the roads are covered by fishnets. So you literally you ride in the corridor of fishnets, and that's the mechanical countermeasure against the drone.

You count that as a kinetic countermeasure?

the tanks. If you look at Russian tanks and sometimes Ukrainian tanks or or equipment, they they all look like porcupines. They have these long sticking, I don't know, poles.

We talked about poles already. Different kind of poles. Yeah.

And and that's the way to protect from drone. That's to make to there's a way to make the drone detonate maybe half a meter or a meter away from from the actual shell of the tank. Or yeah.

Sometimes there are like nets on on top of these tanks just welded some extra sort of equipment. Then, of course, there are guns that like, what both Russians and Ukraine or Ukrainians are beginning to experiment with is kind of interceptor drone, anti FPV interceptor drone, which you put on top of something like a gun, like a harpoon sort of thing. And when you see like a drone coming at you, maybe you can notice or hear it from 200 meters or a 100 meters.

You have a couple of seconds. And you grab that thing, you point it, and you fire it. And then on board it has certain AI that helps to guide the the small drone towards an attacking drone and intercept it that way.

So those are the things that are being developed and, like, we're working on some of these things as well. And then you can imagine, like, an armor with hundreds of of drones on top of it, which are protector drones. Sort of like active armor.

Whenever they see a drone coming at you, they like take off. That's cool.

Yeah. Like, have Skinex. It's by Rheinmetall, by the guy whom we mentioned today.

Skinex is considered to be an okay weapon. Their their shots are quite expensive though. Mhmm.

Cost effect in in in sort of a more more abstract way. So I was last year speaking at a Land conference. It's the biggest USAA, US USA Army conference in Europe called called the Land Euro.

And there was an expo there. And there was like a Raytheon RTX booth there. And Raytheon is an amazing company.

Gosh, we love Raytheon. They're making Patriots. Patriots are the best.

And they make a bunch of other things.

is like they have in two variations, two kilowatt oh, sorry, 10 kilowatt laser and 20 kilowatt laser. I'm like, okay, 10 kilowatt laser. Tell me about it.

It's like, can it take down an FPV drone? Yes, of course it can. I'm like, okay, cool.

How much time does it take to take down an FPV drone? And they're like, well, maybe three seconds. I'm like, three seconds.

That's like a lot of time. But okay, maybe fine. And what if FB drone tries to evade.

Right? And it's like, well, we will retarget it again. And it's like, and then three seconds start again.

Yeah. Okay. Well, can it take down, like, a dozen FPV drones?

Like, yeah, for sure. I'm like, okay. Dozen FPV drones, thirty seconds, maybe s two kilometers, maybe s maybe no.

And I'm like, okay, how how much does it cost? And this is something like $3,000,000 or something like that. And I'm like, okay, $3,000,000.

So that is 6,000 FPV drones. I doubt this thing will be able to handle 6,000 FPV drones or even 600 FPV drones coming at it at the same time. So you have this kind of economic.

And, you know, this product may not be necessarily product against an FPV drone. It might or against an FPV drone in an active battlefield environment. It might be guarding a stadium in a peaceful country.

And then, you know, for some random dudes launch couple drones above a stadium, shoot them down. Okay. Everyone's happy, although the drone will fall down, maybe fall in someone's head.

That wouldn't be cool. So you would want something like catching bad drones with a net above a stadium, so something like that. But whatever.

My point is the economics matters.

What about just like a more powerful laser? Like a 100, you know, kilowatt laser or something? They wouldn't need to spend No.

That that's worse. You need less powerful laser that that achieves the same effect. And more powerful yeah.

More powerful laser would be more expensive, heavier, more difficult to transport. It will be more difficult to make many of them, and therefore, you wouldn't be able to cover a long frontline and would be super expensive to replace if it gets damaged, of those issues. So the the reason why FPV drones or iPhones become so popular is because they're small and everyone can have one, you know, and so is with the countermeasures.

So that's, you know, you were asking me about sort of policy advice. So that's like another sort of mental shift that you gotta gotta go through. It's it's no longer about an aircraft carrier that costs whatever $14,000,000,000 and takes forever to build.

It's it's about mass that is you can iterate on very quickly, you can upgrade it, everyone can operate it. And then that mass when it is combined or the technologies when they're, you know, extrapolated from like one domain to another domain, they add up rate as as it happens with software. So I think that's that's important.

Look, I don't know if I fully agree with not the smartest army. Who is the smartest army? That's a great question.

I don't know. I don't know. I I think that those are, like, very dangerous assumptions to make.

Who is the smartest army in World War one? Like, I will define smart. Why why do you think so?

Why do you think Russia is not the smartest army? Okay. I mean, maybe this is just my own, you know, information.

But Maybe I agree with you, you know, but I'm just, like, I'm naturally wired now Yeah. To challenge those assumptions. Okay.

No. No. That's that's a that's a really good point.

They're super stupid. Of course. Like, they were marching at Kyiv with their parade costumes and, like, you know, they were thinking they're gonna have a parade in Kyiv in in a few days.

Like, that was super stupid. And, like, there were lots of stupid things that are, like, they have no regard, no care for human life. They're sending those Russian folks just, like, without armor, without anything, like, for folks on crutches, like, sending them to stormy kind positions.

And it's like They're they're think at this point there's Yeah. I have, like I have actually a good friend. He's he's American.

He's he's from Seattle. He's, you know, served had been in in specialist forces here in The US, had been in maybe three deployments, and then went to Ukraine and volunteered. And he's been fighting since, like, 2022.

He's a very good friend of mine. So at some point, he's like, he's been texting me and he's like, okay, I'm near Pokrovsk. And I was like, not Pokrovsk.

It was, gosh, the other city, Chassevyar. Mhmm. And and he's like, okay.

So what Russians are doing, they're just creating so much work for all the all the psychologists who are gonna heal those Ukrainian whatever, rifleman or machine gunman who are just like shooting at the Russians who are like going nonstop. Right? So it's like causing Russians are causing psychological trauma on Ukrainians because they're dying in such stupid way.

Jeez. That is indeed stupid of of sort of Russian higher command, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. But then that's the resource they have.

I don't know. I I I I I hope we will become Protests soon. I'm working on that.

I'm working on that. I feel like but then but then, like I I wish I wish, like, Protests with with a speed closer to to, like, humans or tyrants, whatever it is. Hopefully, we we can do protos technology with a Zurich speed.

That that would be the best. That that I think that's that's what the high housewives are working on. In fact You cannot beat those housewives.

Do not oppose Ukraine housewives. With Ukraine housewives for sure. Yeah.

yeah. Can you finish that story? We actually we we did get married, but we postponed the wedding as social event until the war is over.

Okay. Cool.

You want peace, be prepared to war. Gotta gotta invest in in defense and security.

Great to Yeah. It was fantastic. Thanks so much.

Awesome.